Mujer a Mujer: Firsthand Account of Levi's

From Fuerza Unida, 4 January 1998

Dear Fuerza Unida Supporters,

Here's an article Mujer a Mujer in Canada wrote about Fuerza Unida a few
years back that was posted on the Internet. Unfortunately they could not
locate the original publication date or place in their records. However,
current contact information for the group is: Maquila Soldarity
Network/Labour Behind the Label Coalition, Popular Education Research Group,
606 Shaw Street, Toronto, Ontario M6G 3L6, Phone: 1-416-532-8584, Fax:
1-416-532-7688, email: perg@web.net

INTRODUCTION --

In these last ten years, Latina, Asian, and African American
working women have been pioneering new forms of community- labor
organizing in low-wage industries, principally beyond the pale of
the AFL-CIO--projects rooted in the community, involving women's
collective self-leadership and a lived understanding of the
necessarily international nature of their struggle.

Almost all of these organizations are facing industries targeted
to be removed from the U.S. in the Free Trade integration of
Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Green Giant has already moved to
Irapuato, the clothing industry of El Paso is slipping fast
across the border to the maquilas of Ciudad Juarez and points
south, Fuerza Unidas' Levi's plant is now making jeans in Costa
Rica. As soon as the Free Trade Treaty opens up the U.S. to
animal imports, the North Carolina poultry industry could easily
jump ship as well.

With 1.1 million workers, the garment industry is the U.S.'s
number one industrial employer. Seventy-five percent of its
workers are women; 39% are undocumented immigrants; 16% are
African-American.

Yet U.S. policies are pushing the industry out--seeing it more
useful as a first step in converting Third World economies from a
model based on production for local consumption to one based on
production for export.

This is the model which was adopted by the newly industrializing
countries in Asia some 30 years ago. It was introduced in Latin
America in Chile under Pinochet, and is an essential part of
Bush's Enterprise for the Americas Initiative.

The garment industry is particularly suited to initiate the
transition to production for export: it is highly mobile, requires
low capital investment, and depends almost entirely on a cheap and
abundant work force.

This model of development, adopted under pressure to generate
currency needed for debt service, is a distorted one. Governments
open their borders to foreign companies which dictate fabric,
style, organization of the workplace, work week, wage levels, and
final destination of the product. In contrast to the former
"import substitution" model, workers' wages are no longer
sufficient to buy the products of their own labor, and the local
market crumbles.

The new export-oriented garment industry utilizes and deepens the
sexual/international division of labor. Textile production and
cutting--the most capital intensive and profitable aspects of the
industry--remain in the U.S., in the hands of a predominantly male
work force; sewing is passed on to women workers in Third World
countries. Even in countries where export-oriented economic
growth has taken place, garment salaries remain at subsistence
levels.

Currently, Mexico provides only 3% of the U.S.'s garment imports.
However, with the Free Trade opening of Mexico's borders, a
massive relocation of garment production from Asia to the Americas
is expected.

New zero inventory, "just-in-time" production systems are playing
a key role in this geographical re-organization of the industry.
Bar code scans of items at purchase send order information to
relatively nearby supply factories. The efficiency of these
systems has cut costs to such an extent that chains such as
Walmart are beginning to switch to U.S. instead of Asian
suppliers, in spite of higher labor costs. Further changes are
expected once Free Trade allows the complete integration of
Mexican labor in this process.

As a sign of things to come, the "maquilazation" of Guatemala is
already underway, led by Korean firms. In Mexico, garment
producers are the first to spread the maquila phenomenon south (to
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Mexico City, and the
Yucatan) from its former confinement along the U.S. border.

The nascent and tentative organizing now taking place in the
maquiladoras along Mexico's northern border has much in common
with the U.S. immigrant women's projects mentioned above. Due to
high turnover rates, it is in the neighborhood, rather than the
workplace, that working women and their families are beginning to
reflect upon and organize to confront the new realities imposed by
the maquiladoras.

Meanwhile, women employed by the labor-intensive industries now
leaving the United States are holding their organizations
together, even after lay-off. "It's even more important to be
organized now that we're in danger of losing our homes, now that
our very survival is at stake," commented Margarita Castro of
Fuerza Unida, in her kitchen one Saturday last month. "We don't
know what is going to happen to us now, but we're going to face it
together."

Rita Alvarez, Petra Mata, Marta Martinez, and Francis Estrella of
Fuerza Unida. They are among the 1150 Levi's workers laid off on
January 15, 1990 when the company announced its decision to move
to Costa Rica. The majority of these women had come to the U.S.
in their youth to support their families. Their families and
roots are now in San Antonio.

Fuerza Unida was founded as a result of the closing of their
workplace. They now have 650 members, and enjoy broad, solid
local and national support. They have filed a class action suit
against the company, are leading a boycott against Levi's
products, and have initiated a national campaign against U.S.
garment plant shut-downs.

"On January 15 they invited us to a meeting at the Downtown
Marriot. It was very elegant. We were seated at tables, when all
of a sudden secretaries and managers poured in and marched around
us like soldiers handing out packets of information. They said
that levis had closed 56 plants.

Then the managers began to speak. After they finished talking, we
just sat there. Some of us began to cry. They told us that they
had assigned each of us a caseworker, and then they called us into
little rooms. The caseworkers asked us how we felt. I told mine,
"How am i supposed to stay calm if i don't have a job anymore?"
All she could say was, "You have the right to say whatever you
feel".

We had suspected that the plant was going to close--there were
little clues everywhere. A year before, they had started sending
pieces to be sewn in the Dominican Republic. We had asked & asked
and they had always said no, that our plant would be the last to
close. After all, we had won the $200 "miracle worker" bonus, the
Best Quality Cup in 1989. After that a lot of people went out and
bought cars, made downpayments on houses--we felt secure, we
thought we'd be able to retire with Levi's.

If they had just told us we could have been preparing ourselves.
I'm not even ashamed to say that if they had offered me the option
of accepting $5 an hour instead of $7.30, I would have taken
it--just for thx security. There's no work of this sort around
here anymore.

The next day, a lot of us went to the plant to pick up our checks
and to see what was happening, what we could do. There outside
the plant was Ruben Solis, a union organizer with the Southwest
Public Workers. He asked us, "Well, aren't you going to do
something?" He was provoking us so that we'd react.

And then came the women from Esperanza Peace & Justice Center,
lawyers from the National Guild, professors from U Texas San
Antonio, all to support us. Seventeen of us showed up at the
first meeting. I volunteered to hand out flyers. I would go to
the warehouse door and look for women I knew among those who were
still working.

The Mexican community will support you, but you have to educate
first. Everyone comes here with their eyes on earning dollars and
they don't want to hear you. They'll say: Things are better
here, why do you want to fight? Especially the young people--they
go to college and don't ever plan to work in this kind of job.

At first everyone said, "You all are crazy. How can you win?" But
now they see how many of us there are and they say, "I'm with
you."

Something that helped us organize is the fact that before Levi's
bought the plant, the former owner (Santone) promoted a family
atmosphere--we took up collections for women's birthdays. We had
community involvement teams made up of representatives from every
line. We didn't have a union but we felt represented, even though
their response was usually nothing more than "we'll look into it",
but that's all you get with unions too.

Of course their "big family" idea was a lot of brain-washing to
try to make us feel like we were part of THEIR family: the
mariachis on Mother's Day, the Halloween costume contests, the
corsages for high production, donuts for no accidents, were just
ways of using us.

But we made their plans backfire. They taught us to be a family,
but they didn't realize how seriously we took the idea. And
Levi's left us another heritage as well: each for her own. That's
how it's been for decades in the United States, that's why you
never hear of unity. And that's why it's so hard to bring people
together in San Antonio, in the whole country, internationally.
So when they dropped the bomb, they thought each of us would go
home alone. But we've sure turned that one around.

Everything we did for the company--there were days when I would be
walking out at 4 am and the manager would call me over and say,
"Sweetie could you be back for the morning shift at 6 am?" and I
would come back and work straight through til the next afternoon.
All of this creates rage against management, you can't imagine.

Everyone was living under a lot of pressure to make our piece rate
so that we can pay for our houses and cars. I was one of the few
Mexicanas who worked as a supervisor until there was a cut-back,
and they demoted me to "trainer", to work with the women who
couldn't make 100%. Almost all of them were older women, who
couldn't even make 70%.

I remember one woman in particular. When I would stand beside her
to time here, she would get so nervous she would shake
uncontrollably. She would say, "Leave me be, I just can't do any
better than this." She would skip breaks, she wouldn't go to the
bathroom. Sometimes I'm even glad the plant closed-- just imagine
what would have happened if one of those women had had a heart
attack, and we would have been responsible...

We had to learn to live with pain. I had to be operated on when
my arm went out of socket. As soon as I got back they put me on
"light duty", but it wasn't light at all. I had to lift packets
of 60 pairs each. We're finding out now that one of the main
reason that the company moved to Costa Rica is to run away from
the fact that 15% of their work force in San Antonio had suffered
occupational injuries.

We used to only focus on our jobs. Now I look up and realize that
I lost 14 years and have nothing to show for it. But I now know
what I want. We were used, but we've now drawn the line. If this
happened in one factory it can happen in another. We want working
people see us as we insist that our rights be respected. We want
them to see themselves in our own experiences.

We are Mexican-American women, most of us having come here to work
when we were very young women. We've always lived under men's
shadows, but as Latinas, Mexicanas, we also carry Adelitas,
soldaderas, feministas within us.

Our husbands are surprised by us now, and there are many divorces.
Others are accepting it because they know that we're determined to
keep on, with our without their permission.

A lot of homes are also breaking up because there's no money. In
the 60's we convinced our husbands to let us work because our
families needed two incomes. Now the money that we had
contributed is gone. We're no longer carrying our share as we had
before.

We fight because we can't provide our children with what we could
before. I sent one of my daughters to college, but I can't send
the rest. That's how the fights start, "But she's your daughter,
too..."

The Levi's shut-down has had a tremendous impact. Our 16 and 17
year olds are having to leave school to work now. As parents we
have no control, we can't hold them back. We can't even buy them
a pair of tennis shoes.

With the organization that we are building, we don't want to
repeat the power pyramid of the system: with the executive
committee on top, then the council, then the members. The
membership comes first for us, that's where decisions are made.

Those of us in leadership have stayed up nights thinking about
this-- We've climbed a mountain, and now we have to go back down
so that we can all climb back up together. It would be
counter-productive if we didn't all go up together.

I remember how at first everything shook--my legs, my voice, my
teeth. I wanted to cry. Then the second time, just my tongue
shook. By the third time they were having to shout "get her down
from there". Diosito santo, there we were in front of important
people, in front of our community.

We hold our meetings every Tuesday. We pay annual dues and $2 a
month. We have a telephone committee to remind women of meetings.
Everywhere we go, we're always looking for ex-co- workers. We try
to encourage them. We offer to pick them up if they don't have a
ride.

We have a council meetings once a month--at first there were just
three members, now there are 15. And we're always inviting
more--the council meetings are open to all membership.

We don't have any economic support--everything we do is through
our own efforts. One woman sells soft drinks, candies and pickles
at our meetings. We raffle donated items. At our hunger strike
last Thanksgiving we received 100 turkies which we raffled.

We have lawyers, who are playing an important role, but we don't
do what they say, but rather we follow the decisions of the
majority. We've found that management is more afraid of a group
of women workers than they are of lawyers. You can make quite an
impact by getting out into the street--you are showing them that
you aren't afraid. The street is free, and people want to hear.
They'll say, "Look at them--they aren't ashamed to stand up", and
you get a lot of publicity.

We went to the stockholders meeting at Levi's headquarters in San
Francisco. We began to chant, hand out flyers and posters. I'm
shy myself, but when I saw our plant manager there I got so
angry...

We've also visited Levi's other plant here in San Antonio which is
still functioning. Management had scared the women, telling them
that we were coming to harass them. But we surprised them by
bringing them carnations. We told them "We're with you, we don't
want your plant to close."

The other Levi's plant has a union, the ILGWU. We went to talk
off the record with the union representative. We said to him,
"You're not supporting us." He told us what we would have to do
so that he would support us--including cancelling our boycott.
But we don't want nobody to tell us what to do.

I worked in the other plant for three months, and had contact with
the union. I don't have anything against any union, but it
doesn't take long to see when "arrangements" have been made. It's
the pyramid again--origin of the great corruption of the world.
Once you get to the top, you have all the power in your hands...

Meanwhile, we investigated and discovered that federal funds for
dislocated workers aren't getting to them. So we've taken the
matter to the legislature and city hall demanding access. That's
how all of us got scholarships to study for 12 months-- to learn
English or get our GED's.

We have agreed that we want Fuerza Unida to become a support and
educational institution. We want to open up an office for
dislocated workers, to teach them about their rights and how to
defend them.

Right now we're supporting the women at San Antonio Dress, and a
strike at a factory in New Braunfels. The women there thanked us
for what they had learned from us, and told us that Fuerza Unida
must continue.

If more working people were awake and aware, and if we could join
together not just in the U.S. but all over, we could change
things. We are facing an almost impossible situation right now,
but hope is always the last thing to die. "